FROM: RUSSELL Т DAVIES TO: BENJAMIN COOK, THURSDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2007 23:45:19 GMTRE: SILENCE IN THE DISCO(...) More importantly, Colin Morgan is beautiful. You meet him in real life and think, yeah, nice, sweet. But he's one of those lucky bastards that the camera absolutely loves. All cheekbones and black hair and mmm! He's a seriously excellent actor, too. Every line, he makes a really interesting choice. (...)

(...) And I think I should call the episode Midnight. What do you think? Or Crossing Midnight, but maybe that's pretentious. David [полагаю, Теннант] has been sent the sсript tonight. I'm slightly dreading his response. All those lines! He's going to kill me. It's the opposite of Voyage of the Damned, that sсript. In Voyage, a group of survivors are wonderful. In Midnight, they're awful. Humans at their worst. All paranoid and terrified. Much closer to the real world - or my view of the world. That's partly why it was so hard to write; the language is very stripped down, there are very few jokes or conversational riffs, all those things that I normally rely on. The characters haven't even got much backstory, which is odd, because Trapped People Dramas usually rely on that. But this one's about who they are now. Very bleak.

6 декабря 2007, Дэвис - Куку:

As a result, we're shifting the transmission order. Steven's two-parter becomes Episodes 8 and 9, Midnight becomes Episode 10, and then Episode 11 remains the same, so there's a one-episode buffer in between Donna's two parallel worlds.Tragically, that means that Midnight is no longer our fiftieth episode. My fanboy heart is broken. It might as well be the Crusader 52 now. What a shame. (And we've lost your marvellous David Troughton/fiftieth episode fact!) Hand on heart, though, I think the new order is good. All the experimental stuff gets shifted further back in the series. I worry that running Midnight and Turn Left consecutively means two lowerbudget episodes in a row - but actually that was the same as Love & Monsters and Fear Her, and the ratings went up, week on week, so I'm worrying for nothing. That doesn't stop me worrying, though.

Text message from: Ben Sent: 07-Dec-200716:16

Hold the presses! I've just realised, Midnight IS still the 50th episode of new Doctor Who... to be shot! Filming on Turn Left started one day earlier, didn't it? So this is still (sort of) the 50th something after all. My fanboy mind is delighted.

Knowing that he's leaving Doctor Who helped Russell put 'a bit more energy' into his Series Four scripts. 'It made them more muscular if anything. In some ways, it took the pressure off. It was bold, all the different directions that we went in this year. If Midnight, for example, had been the greatest disaster in the history of the world, I wouldn't have cared. If people had said, "That was terrible, all the kids were bored," it wouldn't have mattered. I'd still be happy with it... whereas if I'd been signed up for a fifth year, I'd really have been questioning my judgement.'As it happens, the Midnight gamble paid off: a 45-minute slice of prime time family drama, featuring a small cast on a single, claustrophobic set, with minimal special effects, was watched by over eight million people, helping Series Four to achieve some of Doctor Who's highest ratings this century. Of course, had the show averaged a weekly audience of three million ('I'd have died on my arse,' chips in Russell), no doubt he'd be sat here now reminding us that the BBC shouldn't be chasing ratings, that Doctor Who is a fine piece of public-service broadcasting, and that plenty of fantastic shows don't attract huge audiences...?

And truth, in writing, is the only important thing. That's what it's for. The whole time, every day, all these pages, all my life, means sitting here looking for something — some line, some insight, some microsecond — that makes me think: yes. Yes, that's true. That's real. I recognise that. I know it. That's all I'm after! It might be a truth discovered ten million times before by other people, but that doesn't matter. If you discover it for yourself, then that makes everything worthwhile. No wonder writing is such hard work! You're strip mining your own head, every day, searching for this stuff — and then those moments of revelation are like a godsend.(...)It's so worth it, when it happens. Oh my word. Gold dust. It feels like vindication. If you want a Doctor Who example, it's there when they all sing the hymn, in the traffic jam, in Gridlock — because, before writing that, I could have given you a hundred intellectual theories about faith and its origins, but I'd never actually felt it until that moment of writing, when I made them all sing. Or it's there in Aliens of London - that moment when Jackie phones the police to report the Doctor. I love the truth of that moment, that she's so shell-shocked, she betrays her daughter. An incredible thing to do, and very real. It's there in the whole 45 minutes of Midnight, in the accuracy of that group mentality. (...)